Iran Rejects Trump’s Pressure as Diplomacy Hits a Breaking Point (with Tony Piazza)

0:00Ben Meiselas:By the time I hit my 50s, I'd learned a few things. Like how family is precious. Work can always wait. And 99 % of people over 50 already have the virus that causes shingles. Not everyone at risk will develop it, but I did. The painful, blistering rash disrupted my life for weeks. Don't learn about your shingles risk the hard way. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist today. Sponsored by GSK. Fox News is streaming live on Fox 1. When it matters most, you want the truth from the voices you trust. Fox News goes beyond the headlines, bringing you the stories you won't hear anywhere else. Live coverage, sharp analysis, real perspective.

0:46Ben Meiselas:At home or on the go, stay connected when it counts. Stream Fox News on Fox 1. Download today. Summer's full of reasons to look your best. Tecovis Western Boots are handcrafted in over 200 steps with premium cowhide and exotic leathers. And they're comfortable right out of the box. No break-in period, just boots you can wear all summer long. Their performance shirting and premium denim keep you cool and put together wherever the season takes you. And of course, you can always stop by Tecovis.com. Tecovis. Forever West. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task. Unless you have a partner like Shopify.

1:27They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling, and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.

1:52Ben Meiselas:Evening, buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice. I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyer's rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. New intelligence reports just leaked, and they paint a damning picture of the current state of the U.S. war in Iran. These reports leaked to the New York Times and also intelligence officials spoke to the New York Times and they've also been speaking to other media outlets.

2:39Ben Meiselas:And what they are saying is alarming and it is consistent. They say and they assess that Iran believes, rightfully so, that the United States has run out of critical weapons like the Patriot interceptors, the THAAD interceptors, and other key munitions. Iran sees itself in the strongest position yet, and they see the United States in the weakest position yet. Iran sees no reason to engage in further negotiations with Trump. They don't believe that negotiations can go anywhere. They feel that Trump will continue to change the terms of the deal as he did with the memorandum of understanding. And they say that their only thing that they're going to be focused on now is either Donald Trump will comply with the prior terms of the MOU or not.

3:32Ben Meiselas:Iran believes it has a deal and either the deal will be followed or there will be continued escalation. Now, we saw over the past 24 to 48 hours, this escalation trap in action, right? 24 hours ago, CENTCOM announced that they struck three Iranian tankers in the Strait of Hormuz after CENTCOM alleges that Iran was shooting hypersonic missiles at the U.S. aircraft carriers and other U.S. ships in the region. Iran responded to the U.S. striking those three tankers by hitting six ships, three tankers, and according to Iran, three other vessels. And from there, we've seen the escalation trap escalate to where it is right now.

4:25Ben Meiselas:And it certainly doesn't seem that there can be a resolution anytime soon. You have reports like this. Iran warns Washington that continued attacks, sanctions, or strikes from regional bases will continue to face retaliation by Iran. Iran says, honor the MOU. We don't want to do further negotiations. We did a deal with you. Either honor the MOU or not. And if you don't honor the MOU, we're not just going to sit back as you do a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. We will continue to now try to strike the aircraft carriers in the region. And we're not just going to be using short-range anti-ship ballistic missiles, but we'll use hypersonic carrier killer Kasem Basir ASBMs, the upgraded version of the short-range anti-ballistic ship missiles that can reach speeds up to Mach 5 to Mach 8.

5:25Ben Meiselas:We will start to use those. And you haven't seen those in open warfare before United States. And Iran assesses the United States as being weaker than ever right now. Now, what is the former mediator who actually was able to get a deal between the United States and Iran, which after announcing there was a deal, then the United States struck Iran in late February and the deal was off. But the Oman foreign minister just published a piece in the Financial Times. In an age of impunity, diplomats are more important than ever, Oman's foreign minister says. There is a tendency on the part of some world leaders to decide that they can do it themselves.

6:12Ben Meiselas:In recent years, diplomacy has been an unforgiving endeavor. A few provisional agreements have achieved limited de-escalations, But there have been no lasting resolutions to any of the dangerous global conflicts that directly threaten lives in Palestine, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, Israel, and Ukraine, and which inflict serious damage upon regional neighbors and the global economy, the Oman foreign minister writes. And he's known as like the most world-renowned mediator on these international diplomatic issues. The second is the tendency on the part of some world leaders to decide that they can do diplomacy themselves without involving diplomats.

6:55Ben Meiselas:The problem is that they soon find that they have very few tools at their disposal with which to advance their objectives. They are forced to resort either to the traditional 19th century imperial method of gunboat diplomacy or to the more refined but equally destructive modern equivalent of using economic power to bully entire populations into submission in the hopes of regime change and the installation of a compliant proxy administration. How are smaller states supposed to act when the rules that once restrained larger states are increasingly ignored? It may be that the best response is to start by patiently, even a little pedantically, insisting upon adherence to some of the old norms.

7:46Ben Meiselas:Repeated invocations of international law may be dismissed as tedious by those whose instincts are to move fast and break things, but they are there to protect the vast majority of the global population. Now is not the time to give up on the principle that the law serves to constrain illegitimate uses of power. I want to explore that more in a way that's very unique and personal to me. Will you join me on this? Because this is very important to me. As you know, I used to be a litigator before starting the Midas Touch Network. about six years ago. And when I was a litigator, one of my mentors was an individual by the name of Tony Piazza, a world-renowned mediator, often viewed as the godfather of mediation in modern civil litigation.

8:44Ben Meiselas:Tony Piazza began as a mediator in 1980, and he really created and pushed forward what we know to be the modern mediation practice of civil litigation today. Now, Tony Piazza has mediated thousands and thousands, 5 ,000, 6 ,000 mediations, so many mediations in the most high-profile cases, big corporations fighting big corporations, billion dollar disputes people show up and they mediate before Tony Piazza and in a day he's often able to resolve these massive cases with these big gigantic companies or big personalities and he's the mediator he's the most sought-after civil mediator in the entire world right now and he's someone who taught me how I could be a better mediator how I could be a better listener how I could deal with conflict resolution back when I was practicing law.

9:47Ben Meiselas:I want to see in this interview, I want to bring him on, if we can apply these principles that he pioneered in a litigation context at the highest level to international diplomacy and the failure right now of international diplomacy to bring parties together, despite the great efforts of some great international diplomats, or at least at the end of the day, to propose a new framework or a way of thinking about mediation and mediating these types of disputes. So I want to bring in Tony Piazza right now, my mentor. You're going to want to watch this full interview right now. Let's bring in the interview I did with Tony yesterday.

10:39Ben Meiselas:Now, I've done a lot of interviews here on the Midas Touch Network over the years, but this is a really special one to me because I'm bringing in a personal mentor of mine, someone who I've learned negotiations from, someone who I've learned mediations from, someone who hasn't appeared on that many podcasts or shows and frankly keeps a lower profile out there. But within the business community, within the community of mediations, especially in high profile litigations, there's really, in my opinion, no equal out there to Tony Piazza, who's done thousands of mediations. And I know Tony's there.

11:25Ben Meiselas:And so, Tony, you're humble. Let me explain also your background. The way modern mediation in American litigation is structured and how it has developed. Again, not an understatement, in my view, to credit Tony Piazza with that. The biggest cases, the most high profile cases, cases involving international litigations, disputes that span borders. the biggest ones out there. I don't want to go into too much of it, but suffice to say, in the litigation community, everybody knows Tony Piazza. And what I wanted to do today, because a lot of my foundational principles, how I think of the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, why it fell apart, the role of countries like Oman and Pakistan and Qatar, and how I think through them, I think through them also through a lens sometimes of these massive cases that I used to work on some of them when I was a litigator.

12:31Ben Meiselas:But these are the types of cases that Tony sees. And just to give you a background, and Tony mediates, and he'll explain to you what that means just as a mediator, the role of a mediator. But lots of these cases could be lasting in some cases years and years or sometimes decades long cases. But you show up at Tony's office. It's often one day of a mediation, although he'll be there to work with the parties, whatever that, you know, whatever it is to get it done. But it's a one day mediation pretty much as a process. And parties resolve these massive disputes in a day. And so I was curious, Tony, as I think about these massive geopolitical issues and I see a struggle for deals to happen.

13:21Ben Meiselas:You know, I was reading an op-ed the other day by the foreign minister of Oman talking about the role of the diplomat and the role of mid-power diplomats to play mediator and to try to resolve these bigger disputes and what it takes, especially when we see a lot more instability in an international level. And it feels like a lot of the world order post-World II has been disrupted and we're in this time period of great change and great chaos and great danger. And can there be an organizational principle out of here? So that's my foundational to start with you, Tony. But I know you've been thinking about this a lot, applying these concepts to international.

14:09Ben Meiselas:I'd love to hear from you what you're thinking, because there's a lot of people who watch this, a lot of international leaders who watch this, who I think can learn from you about some of your ideas. Well, the elephant in the room for a conversation like this is whether we are assuming that we have two sides that are committed to finding a resolution and then honoring it if a deal is struck. Because unless you have people at the negotiating table with that mindset and the actual authority to back it up. You're just witnessing crude political theater. So if we start with the premise, whether it's trade negotiations between the U.S.

14:58and Canada, that there are really bona fide negotiations going on. The question is, can we harvest some insight from four decades of mediating literally thousands of complex, contentious legal disputes, both in the U.S. and internationally that might reduce the chance of a trade negotiation deteriorating into a trade war? The answer is, nah, probably not. But since it's so rare that I have a chance to have a conversation with you, I think at least worth spending a few minutes taking another look at it. And I say nah, probably not, because it is just so much more challenging. I bow before the courageous mediators in Oman and elsewhere who are trying to stop wars.

15:50It's just so much more complicated when there's that kind of a political overlay to a negotiation. But if we are determined to extract some useful insight from our hard-won experience negotiating settlement of legal disputes, I think the best candidate would be to not default prematurely as a mediator to trading positions between the parties and strive instead to establish a real evaluative dialogue between the mediator and each party. and then just relentlessly stay in dialogue until both sides have realistically assessed and have a real objective grasp of the risks of not reaching an agreement and conversely have identified and evaluated all possible options for getting to an agreement.

16:52Because the single most disruptive force interfering with negotiations of any kind of dispute and protracting fighting gratuitously is simple reactivity. direct negotiations between parties where parties are trading punches and counter punches demands and counter demands is so fraught with reactivity that it really tends to blur objective evaluation of risks and options we structure our mediation process in the field that I work in expressly to reduce that reactivity by redirecting the dialectic of direct negotiations into a dialogue between the mediator and each party. And with that, I'm going to do a lateral back to you for a moment, Ben.

17:55So talk to us, though, about two parties.

18:00Ben Meiselas:This is a hypothetical. They show up. Maybe one side is there for the right reasons. One side isn't. Maybe both sides were ordered to show up. But there's a great deal of tension. And to remind our audience, lots of these situations could be some of the biggest disputes out there in litigation context. context. These are parties going after each other's throats and they may be there reluctantly, they may be there willingly, but they don't like each other, you know, and there's levels to the not like from don't like to hate to I can't even look at them. But you have to create a the environment that removes the reactivity and refocuses the dialogue, not on a horse trade of numbers, 25%, 30%, 15%.

19:01Ben Meiselas:You don't do that. That's a bad strategy. And talk to us about that. What we are doing is understanding and building common understandings, almost like one of these you know, circular graphs of where is their commonality? How do we bring people together? And so how do you find in those environments where people don't even want to have the conversation to start that? What are strategies that you do? To make it more concrete, I'll sanitize names, but borrow an actual case from last year, where two multinational companies, neither of which are US-based, flew me out to Hong Kong for a day to mediate closure on a patent licensing dispute, where the parties at the start of the day were only a little over$3 billion apart in terms of what they thought the balancing payment should be.

20:04So it's a good example of a few principles. One, it really doesn't matter how far apart the parties are at the start of the day. What matters is determining what is driving those disparate evaluations of what things should be like at the end of the day. Obviously, there's self-interest, but assume sophisticated parties who have been looking at the various factors in the dispute, sometimes for years. And just as an aside, the kind of work we have, we have people come to us after they've been fighting, sometimes for a decade, having spent millions, tens of millions, and in a few notable cases, over$100 million each fighting with each other.

20:58Now, again, these sophisticated parties, they're trying to resolve a dispute. what could possibly be getting in the way of their evaluations about where realistically they could land the plane and resolve the dispute? And the answer is simple reactivity. And I know that seems simplistic, but it's such a powerful force. When parties are trying to negotiate directly, it's just another display of Newton's second law. Every action is eliciting more of a reaction than a response. So let's get back to that case. So they flew me out for a day, beginning of the day, said, good morning. Thank you all for making time to be here.

21:42The end of the day, they had an agreement. Now, what could possibly have changed in one day to take parties that distance? And the answer is, we were not during that day engaged in the same process they had been in. And it was not that I added something that made a difference in their discussions. It was that we extracted something that was getting in the way of their discussions. And we did that simply by after that initial joint session where the parties made a presentation, explained how right they were and why it should come out the way they wanted. And I summarized the presentations back to demonstrate that I had actually taken the time in advance to really assimilate what the dispute was about.

22:31We went into caucus and from then on the process was one of an evaluative dialogue between each side and the mediator rather than a dialectic between the parties. Up until that day, this had been going on. During that day, we simply redirected it so that each party was in a less reactive, evaluative dialogue with me. And simple as it sounds, that's really the heart of it. And maybe on a good day, I add 10, 15 % to the equation in terms of helping it get worked out. But that's not false modesty. The heart of the process is simply making sure that you're not just trading offers and demands or position statements, that you're giving the parties the opportunity to assess risks and assess options in a less reactive environment.

23:32Ben Meiselas:As we talk about the U.S.-Canada negotiations, among the accusations of what led to the breakdown was different points of negotiating people who were taking different positions to Canada and then a last minute change in some of the terms. and that, and by the way, the sides fight each other over what was what, but I think for purposes of this dialogue and focused on strategically how you see these things, that must happen where you've been in a day and it's productive and you think you're dealing with decision makers who have all the attributes of the right decision makers. They have the title, they have the position, you know right away when you're dealing with, and we would know right away when we're not dealing with the right people, but you think you have the right people.

24:26Ben Meiselas:And then poosh, all of a sudden, a board member comes in that you're like, where's this guy from? Or the spouse of the chairman comes in or the chairman who you didn't realize still has a role. So I ain't effing doing this. So talk to us about that though, and how you deal, how do you deal with that and then get the parties back on track when a variable comes in and changes the dynamic. And give me another 46 years, and I might get to be good enough to be able to routinely deal with that situation effectively. But as I sit here now, I can tell you that that is the number one reason for a failed mediation, to not really have at the table, engaged in the process moment by moment the people who really have the final say in it so we counsel people do everything you can in advance to figure that one out so you're not wasting your time and money spending the day but you are absolutely right that is the a number one reason for failure having said that um can you ever retrieve it sometimes um but it's tough if you thought you had a deal and then party comes back and says, yeah, no, we can't get that confirmed by our board.

25:50What I do personally, I'm not saying this is how standard practice should be, but I figure at that point, I got to put my money where my mouth is and I'll usually donate my time to see if I can have either a final session with the right people there, or maybe some kind of caucus with the parties who are having trouble deciding what their position should be. And we just continue it. Continuing dialogue when you've lost the momentum of the day in mediation is really hard. But continuing dialogue is the only way I know in any relationship, in any negotiation, to really give it a chance.

26:39Ben Meiselas:Now, mediation, I've learned all of like a lot of my truthfully foundational principles of how I think about deal making and negotiations, you know, is from you and reflecting and never trying to lose my temper. and I would give opening statements when I would do mediations with you and they evolved over time as I went out as this, what I thought was a hard charging litigator and how you were supposed to act in front of your client to maybe that's not the most effective approach if my job is to actually do a deal, which brings me to this kind of final point. And I hope this is kind of chapter one of a lot of chapters that we can do together because I want you to share your wisdom with people.

27:27Ben Meiselas:But mediation and resolution and negotiation is not an act of domination. There's litigation. And then in the international sphere, there's war. And at the end of a mediation, it's not one side, usually, almost always, not destroying the other side and the other side leaves just like we got destroyed and demolished and crushed. There's other forums for that. That's not what you do. And so I think part of the entering in with an idea of negotiation, the process, getting away the reactivity is also recognizing why do we even do this? Why have you devoted your life, Tony Piazza, to mediation, which has now become foundational in the American jurisprudence and international jurisprudence with a lot of the learnings from you.

28:25Ben Meiselas:But why do we do this? That's what I want to end with. Why do we care? Why mediate? Why do this? Why not just, you know what, the parties hate each other? Let's duke it out. That to me maybe sounds simple, but there's layers to it and levels to it. And it's important what mediation has done in a litigation concept. Talk to us about that more broadly. Well, if we had another hour, I'd love to have a broader conversation with you about that. Since we don't, I'll close with this thought. I've relatedly come to accept that if I want to have the benefits of living in a democracy, which I'm personally really fond of, that what comes with that is I have to be willing, and I think this really applies in any relationship, political or otherwise, I have to be willing to accept that I'm in relationship.

29:22I'm in this with people with a very broad array of life experiences and opinions about things, many of which I'm going to rather vigorously disagree with, and I have to stay in dialogue with them. So the relevance of that back to mediating. It almost doesn't matter what you come in with, what level of baggage, what level of emotion. It is nice when people don't start the day by yelling at each other and getting people's backs up, but it isn't really critical. What's critical, again, is not how people come in, not how far apart, not how religiously convicted they are to their positions. It's what the process comprises to redirect that from that kind of a highly charged and generally unproductive reactive exchange into an evaluative dialogue.

30:31So if you really want to aspire to have that as a mediator, it behooves you to have spent time in advance really immersing yourself in my work usually people provide us with briefs that allow us to do that but really doing a deep dive into what the parties see as the main issues they're fighting over demonstrating that early on the process again in our work in the joint session by being able to summarize back a lengthy complicated presentation by a party in a few minutes without spinning it, distorting it, missing any of the critical facts, thereby reassuring the party that made the presentation that you've in fact put in the time in advance and therefore they have some rational reason for putting credibility into the discussion you're going to have privately in caucus where you start trying to give realistic feedback about what their risks are going forward on the path they're on.

31:34So to tie it together as best I can in a few minutes, what I try to do in my work and what I'm very slowly learning to try to do in my life is to just accept that there are going to be ever so many opportunities for conflict and then to try to approach discussions about how to deal with the conflict in a more productive evaluative dialogue a less reactive dialectic.

32:07Ben Meiselas:Tony Piazza everyone, personal mentor of mine, someone who is in the legal community an absolute legend in the field of mediation, a pioneer in the field of mediation, someone who's done mediations, thousands of them, the the size of disputes between nation states with these major corporate disputes that you resolve. And so I want to call this chapter one because I want to do more of them, whether you like it or not. So I'm going to throw that out there. So this is chapter one, and I hope we'll be able to have chapter two, three, and four where we can start with this platform, with this audience, with world leaders who watch this show, hear from it and take from it what they will and what they won't.

32:57Ben Meiselas:But I think sincerely that there is learning lessons that have been helpful to these disputes here in the United States and abroad litigation that can be extracted and can be learned. And, you know, I hope we can do more of these, Tony. So thanks for all you do. Thanks for everything, man. I appreciate you. A few things I'd rather do with my time than converse with you, my friend. Thank you. Take care. Everybody. And subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Hey, if you want the full story, how democracy got here and how we take it back, pre-order our new book, WTF America, today. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description.

33:40Ben Meiselas:Let's do this.